It was an ordinary day in 2011 when I found myself watching a YouTube video of a gun owner making a semiautomatic rifle discharge bullets rapidly, as if it were an automatic weapon. My gun-owning husband watches firearms videos like this one, however, I had never seen one. Intrigued, I sat down on the couch to absorb the imagery. Hooking his thumb through the belt loop of his pants, the YouTuber demonstrated how pushing the gun forward, rather than pulling the trigger, allowed the gun's recoil to "keep the gun going." In other words, he was bump firing his rifle.

--(snip) The filmmakers then follow the seven teachers on a visit to a gun range. One teacher is a military combat veteran, while several others have never touched a gun in their lives. They shoot this gun and that gun, carefully supervised by a pro, trying to hit a target shaped like a person. They cry out when the gun recoils and flinch when an empty shell ejects. Is this an appropriate classroom role for a teacher? (snip)

PRAIRIE DU SAC - Jeff Recob is a gun owner, National Rifle Association member and small businessman who sells ammunition, gear and gun supplies to target shooters. He also thinks it’s time for his side to give a little in the gun debate. “As far as I’m concerned, we’d better be ready to give something up now. I’m talking about us as NRA members and the gun-owner community,” said Recob, interviewed at his family business, Recob’s Target Shop, just weeks after a Florida high school massacre set off a new round in the country’s unflagging gun debate. “Hopefully, the NRA...

----(snip)In the aftermath of the 1929 massacre, that question was answered with action, passage of the historic National Firearms Act. Now, as we struggle with how to keep our kids safe in 2018, we should look to the effectiveness of that law. Passed in 1934, the original National Firearms Act imposed a tax on the making and transfer of certain firearms, as well as a special (occupational) tax on persons and entities engaged in the business of importing, manufacturing, and dealing in NFA firearms.

It is perfectly legal, at the moment, to go online and buy most of an unassembled gun, without a serial number, without any registration requirements. Only a modicum of skill is needed to put it all together. How can it be so easy for anyone to acquire and assemble an AR-15, or AK-47, or something even more deadly? Even in Connecticut, which passed some of the nation’s toughest gun laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, anyone could get a ready-to-assemble gun by mail. Thankfully, so-called ghost guns are on the radar of Connecticut legislators, who are considering...

But the attention to the Second Amendment is misplaced. What neither side in the gun debate seems to realize is that at the moment, when it comes to the sort of restrictions that lie within the zone of possibility, the Second Amendment is neither an obstacle nor a protection. It’s an irrelevance. Federal laws regulating guns have been around for a long time, including age requirements for gun owners, a prohibition on felons and a mandatory background check for purchases from a licensed dealer. These rules predated the Supreme Court’s momentous 2008 decision striking down the District of Columbia’s complete...

With stunning poise and steely confidence, Cameron Kasky, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, confronted U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., live on CNN on Wednesday evening. “Can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the (National Rifle Association)?” he demanded. In the arena where the town hall event was held, the crowd of some 7,000 — most of them connected to the school community that was shattered when a gunman killed 17 during a Feb. 14 rampage — stood and cheered for more than 20 seconds. After a bit of back-and-forth,...

--Chapman occasionally gets it mostly right-- --from the article-- "A 2013 study of the 1994 law for the National Institute of Justice said, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.” It also said, “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Even if the law had any positive effect then, it would be far less likely to help today because there are far more of these guns now. In 1994, Americans owned about 1.5 million...

One late afternoon over Labor Day weekend in 2016, near the arches welcoming truck drivers into the old stockyards south of Bridgeport, a gunman in a red minivan leveled a rifle and fired at a motorcyclist. The gunman hit the bike but not the driver. An officer found .223-caliber casings, the kind used in rifles modeled after the AR-15. The rounds leave large, jagged wounds. If used by someone trained to shoot, they can hit a target from 650 yards. A city block is 220 yards. Two gangs — the Saints and La Razas — had been sporadically using rifles...

--(snip) "There is even more to the story: CDC data also show that within our nation’s cities, black Americans are, on average, eight times more likely to be killed by firearms than those who are white. The rate of death by gun homicide for black people exceeds those among whites in all 50 states, but there is tremendous variation in the magnitude of this disparity. In 2015, a black person living in Wisconsin was 26 times more likely to be fatally shot than a white person in Wisconsin. At the same time, a black person in Arizona was “only” 3.2...

Timothy Ward was a convicted felon barred from possessing a firearm on the night he fatally shot a man during an argument on Chicago’s West Side. Minutes after the July 2015 slaying, police stopped a light-colored van and found the suspected murder weapon — a black revolver — under the front passenger seat where Ward had been sitting. The gun had been sold just four months earlier at Suburban Sporting Goods in Melrose Park, a cramped strip mall store about 10 miles from the gritty block where 25-year-old Charzelle Hayes was killed, according to Chicago police. Ballistics matched the Nagant...

For a few days after the Las Vegas sniper attack, it seemed as if Congress might actually move to ban the device known as the “bump stock,” which the gunman used to convert his semiautomatic rifles into, essentially, machine guns that could fire 90 shots in 10 seconds into a crowded music festival. That moment — like so many before it — seems to have passed. So what gun policy measure are lawmakers discussing in Congress these days? An absurd yet dangerous proposal that would drastically undercut states’ abilities to set reasonable rules about who gets to carry a weapon....

SPRINGFIELD Â— Downstate Democrats joined with Republicans Thursday to thwart a ban on devices that make a semi-automatic rifle shoot about as fast as a fully automatic weapon Â— arguing the bill would have outlawed too many types of weapons. State Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Smithton, said about 40 percent of the Â“50 to 60â€³ guns he owns would be banned under the bill.

Melrose Park police sent an appalling message over Labor Day weekend when they auctioned off an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle to raise money for their police union. EDITORIAL They apparently did not care that Melrose Park, the very town they have sworn to serve and protect, bans possession of AR-15s — semiautomatic rifles that can load magazines with multiple bullets. ADVERTISING The village bans the gun for good reason. Nobody need such a powerful weapon to protect themselves their homes or to hunt. And the guns can be exceptionally dangerous when they fall into the wrong hands. But, as Robert Herguth...

WASHINGTON — The days are growing colder, and soon millions of American hunters will pursue a time-honored tradition. They will load their automatic weapons with armor-piercing bullets, strap on silencers, head off to the picnic grounds on nearby public lakes — and start shooting. If you do not immediately recognize this pastime as part of America’s heritage, then you are sadly out of step with the current Republican majority in Congress. On Tuesday, a House panel takes up the “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act of 2017,” which promises “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing and shooting.”...

Five or 10 years from now, Americans will look at cheap, sugary drinks the way they now look at smoking on airplanes and in restaurants — as a really bad idea. Cook County, having recently implemented a tax on sweetened beverages, is at the forefront of this movement to encourage people to transition to healthier drinks. But the county’s leadership role is in jeopardy. The beverage industry and retailers are pushing hard to repeal this tax. We can’t think of a worse idea.

<p>2:55 p.m.</p>
<p>A senior police official in Spain says that a single police officer killed four of the suspects who carried out the attack in the Catalan seaside town of Cambrils.</p>
<p>Catalan regional police official Josep Lluis Trapero says that it was "not easy" for the officer involved despite being a professional. A total of five suspects were killed after the Cambrils attack in which a car plowed into a crowd, killing a woman.</p>

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, among the busiest in the nation, must set its priorities to fit the times. Twenty years ago, the top priority might have been public corruption. Ten years ago, it might have been white-collar crime. EDITORIAL Today, as John Lausch prepares to take over the job, we urge the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago to focus on one priority above all others: Ridding our city of illegal guns. Shootings are the scourge of Chicago, so much so that President Donald Trump has mocked our city for its violence, though he has done nothing to combat...

Cicero cop shooting tied to gun Chicago P.D. should have destroyed The Watchdogs 07/28/2017, 12:31pm This is the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, serial number J515268, that Cook County Judge William Stewart Boyd turned in to the Chicago Police Department to be destroyed. Instead, years later, it ended up at the scene of a police shooting in Cicero involving a cop with a troubled disciplinary record. | Court files Casey Toner | Better Government Association Sign-Up for our News & Politics Newsletter Sign-Up Thirteen years ago, William Stewart Boyd, a Cook County judge, drove to a South Side church to...